FILMS OF THE MONTH
64 | Sight&Sound | May 2020Reviewed by Kate Stables
Right at the start of this blackly comic revenge
thriller, lascivious MTV-style close-ups of men’s
chino-clad crotches, paunches and butts gyrating
on a dance floor are the first sly signal that
writer-director Emerald Fennell is literally out
to change our POV. Her provocative, polemical
drama wraps its sharp points in a comic, candy-
coloured shell. Carey Mulligan’s sweet-faced
Cassie is a medical school drop out, still living
with her parents at 30. But she’s got a vigilante
vocation, faking staggering-drunk blackouts in
bars to smoke out the men who’ll try and take
advantage of her. Taut but teasing, the film keeps
us guessing initially as to whether she’s a femme
fatale or female-rights enforcer; is that blood or
hot-dog ketchup staining her blouse on the walk
home? Rather than the evil perverts of Ms .45
(1981) or the paedophile of Hard Candy (2005),
this #MeToo update of the rape-revenge genre
starts by skewering those bro-rapists who see a
drunk girl as a free pass – chancers who ply the
prone and confused Cassie with alcohol and drugs
while whispering “It’s OK, you’re safe.” Telling
details – their increasingly invasive caresses of
her floppy, unenthusiastic body – make these
scenes disturbing as well as mordantly funny.
The men’s terror and denial as she snaps sober to
shame them (“What’s my name, Neil?”) forcesa bark of uncomfortable laughter from the
audience. After decades of drunk-girl-fair-game
tropes in films like Animal House (1978) or Sixteen
Candles (1984) – even 2007’s Superbad toys with
the idea – Fennell’s what-the fuck frankness
about rape culture is bracing. Her film’s home
truths come prettily swathed in night-time neon
or the cupcake pastels of Cassie’s dinky coffee-
shop day job. A lightly stylised look, rather than
a directorial design imprint, it leavens the story’s
heavy subject matter, along with Cassie’s good-
girl braid and cutesy rainbow manicure. These
suggest that girlish daytime Cassie is as much
a clever construct as her night-time party-girl,
who artfully smears the ‘blow-job lips’ copied
from YouTube beauty tutorials, to signal she’s a
hot mess. Her beguiling dialogue shifts in synch
with her masquerades, veering from adolescent
sarcasm with her parents to wary pertness with
a prospective suitor and deadpan cool with her
targets. Fennell often poses Cassie in the centre
of the frame, in lingering shots that emphasise
her isolation. Drunkenly draped crucifix-style
on a banquette, or given a saintly halo by a wall-
clock, we’re reminded that she’s on a crusade.
Less nimbly managed are the script’s crunchy
shifts in tone, as Cassie’s witty bar-bro shaming
switches into an elaborate vendetta to avenge
the college-party assault of her long-dead best
friend Nina. Tackling another overdue target, she
wreaks revenge on the attacker’s enablers, who
refused to recognise Nina’s ordeal. Dishing outchillingly ingenious payback to Nina’s disloyal
female friend Madison, and the disbelieving
Dean of Students (the film cunningly deploys
the well-beloved Connie Britton here, to up the
discomfort), generates some of the film’s best,
most squirm-inducing encounters. Mulligan’s
fierce focus lets Cassie cut through their trite
justifications like a scalpel. Under the crisp
dialogue the scenes thrum with the injustice of
an unacknowledged crime, and the complicity
that loads guilt back on to female victims.
Ranged around these encounters, the story
veers between tones and genres, cramming in a
halting indie romance between Cassie and her
med-school friend Ryan (an amiably awkward
Bo Burnham) and slices of moody character
study. It’s Fennell’s first feature, laudably full
of daring and darkness, but its ambition makes
for an occasionally bumpy ride. Punchy but
on-the-nose music choices accentuate this – a
car-battering headily jacked up with Wagner’s
‘Liebestod’, and Anthony Willis’s score emitting
ominous uh-oh thuds at tense moments. Cassie
and Ryan’s romance is cemented by their giggly
warbling of Paris Hilton’s tinny ‘Stars Are Blind’
on a date. This happy coupled-up montage
usefully reveals the soft side under Cassie’s brittle
carapace. If the grindhouse-style poster suggests
she’s a wet-lipped exterminator, the film itself
offers up a far from triumphal heroine, one
whose cause has consumed her life. It lingers
on Cassie’s losses, hesitations and sacrifices, to
create a chewily complex character. She’s so fully
realised, in fact, that only the dorkily persistent
Ryan registers alongside her. Everyone else,
from Cassie’s bemused parents to her smugly
oblivious former college pals, are cleverly crafted
plot-easers, fuel for her determined rage.
In her delicately malevolent 2018 short Careful
How You Go, and in the second series of Killing
Eve, for which she was showrunner, Fennell
showed her facility with female anger. As the
film revs back into thriller mode, the calm, cold-
eyed determination fuelling Cassie’s plans nods
to assassin Villanelle. Though the thriller dips
into the same pitch-black playfulness as the
TV show, Mulligan’s extraordinary, chameleon
performance gives the film way more emotional
range and weight. The vulnerability she showed
in films like 2011’s Shame and Drive is blended
with anger, palpable pain and a dry wit. Mulligan
is the film’s motor, powering it through its
surprising turns. Her talents are essential to the
shock tactics of the last act, with its risky twist-
on-twist unravelling. The ending will divide
viewers down new fault-lines, not necessarily
those of woke-versus-bloke. Where slavering
old-school revenge dramas like Lipstick (1978)
and Dirty Weekend (1993) could be accused of
exploitation, today’s female-helmed thrillers
face a barrage of conflicting opinions. Still, the
film seems opportune. If the grand guignol, man-
eating revenge-comedy of Jennifer’s Body (2007)
arrived too early to tap #MeToo rage, Promising
Young Woman feels right on time. Cassie’s trail
of vengeance proves a hell of a teaching tool for
the viewer, as well as her targets. Fennell’s film
shows wittily and with high style how lack of
accountability for sexual abusers is baked into
the system. Calling out everything from everyday
predation in bars and clubs, to the complicity
of bystanders to sexual assaults, it makes its
audience look hard at what we’ve normalised
and why. Watching Cassie mete out her rough
justice, we’re being schooled as well as shocked.‘ Promising Young Woman’
feels right on time. Cassie’s
trail of vengeance proves a
hell of a teaching tool for the
viewer, as well as her targets
USA 2020
Director: Emerald FennellWhat was the impetus behind the film?
I really wanted to write a film about female
revenge. Recently, there have been a lot of
movies about women taking matters into their
own hands, and they tend to be super violent
or super sexy, or very, very depressing. What
I wanted to do is try to write a film about how
an ordinary woman might take revenge in the
real world, and that’s very rarely reaching for a
gun. It’s weirder and more twisted than that.What other ideas took shape
as the script developed?
If you’re writing a film about how we have
all been complicit in a toxic, sexist, abusive
culture, the first thing you have to do is look
at yourself and how you’ve been part of that.
What was important to me about this movie is
that there’s nothing in it that isn’t extremely
commonplace. I wasn’t interested in making a
film that examined terrible crimes and terrible
acts of violence and the people that commit
those things. I’m much more interested in
our culture and thinking, how are we all part
of this awful knot that we need to unpick?
Can you talk about your main
character Cassie?
With protagonists in revenge thrillers – or even
romantic comedies, which this film arguably
is too – it’s very easy to make them tropes.
I wanted Cassie to be as close to somebody
that I might know as possible. So, Cassie’s
quite cold, quite reserved, incredibly funny
and wry and selfish. I wanted her to also be
appealing, and to make herself deliberately
appealing to people. She knows, like a lot
of women do, how to project normality and
charm and sensuality when she needs to.
I wanted her to be a bit of a flytrap.Q&A Emerald Fennell, director
Promising
Young Woman